20 Stunning Background Images To Use In Your WordPress Website, For Free!

Ever stuck without the right photo for a blog post or a parallax background, but don’t want to use a flat color? It’s common for our users to struggle with finding great imagery to use in our themes, so we’ve designed a set of 1920px by 1080px images that will solve that very problem. Take a look at how they can be used in our themes, download them below, and use them anywhere for anything. These images are released as Open Source under the GPL (GNU General Public License) 2.0. Enjoy!

Preview The Complete Set

This set of background images includes 12 different background textures and multiple color variations for a total of 20 unique looks. Below is a small preview of each design. Click the thumbnails to see complete image.

Examples Of Backgrounds In Our Themes

Almost all of our themes incorporate a possible background image of some kind. Whether it be the main background image of the website, the background image of a slider on the homepage, or just a nice texture for a post thumbnail, these images can be incorporate for wonderful results. Here are some examples of how these images might be used in our themes:

By Nick Roach

I am the founder and CEO here at Elegant Themes. When I'm not hard at work on new themes, I enjoy writing an article or two on our blog!

Some of these backgrounds have huge filesizes. Won’t these really slow our website’s down — especially for mobile users?

MMikeGaudet
September 24, 2013

Just reduce the image using a tool such as Photoshop or the free Microsoft image resizer. All you need for display is 72 dpi and reducing a file to this will greatly reduce the file size. All that would be negatively affected would be print quality and you aren’t printing thd background.

I’m loving it but have a suggestion that would help with the large file size problem that all the images with textures have:

Why not break the images up into two (or maybe three) layers? The under layer would be the illuminated gradient (like #4) which is <50Kb. The over layer would be the texture pattern which is small (a few Kb in a .png file) if you allow it to simply be a repeating pattern.

That would get most of these images down under 50 or 60Kb and even add to the flexibility of the package.

All in all, though, THANKS!

Nick
September 19, 2013

These images are intended to be used as Featured Images in WordPress, which do not support repeating backgrounds. They are also re-sized and cropped, so the initial size of the image doesn’t matter so much. Furthermore, even though some have patterns, the images itself is not repeatable due to the varying values throughout the image.

If you plan on using the image as a background for the entire website, then you can simply size down the images in Photoshop before you use them. I think it’s better to provide the largest resolution in the package so that they can be sized down to whatever size you find necessary. You can’t size things up 🙂

this is just…I even have no premium resources to be this good like your backgrounds here. Thank you for sharing this for free. Instead of having 9999999999+ average backgrounds I can really rely on those – look beautifull, good job !

Awesome! Where i can find the single tile? So i can use it in repeat mode in less bytes.

Stefan
October 8, 2014

On September 19, 2013 the author said this about the images:

Nick
September 19, 2013

These images are intended to be used as Featured Images in WordPress, which do not support repeating backgrounds. They are also re-sized and cropped, so the initial size of the image doesn’t matter so much. Furthermore, even though some have patterns, the images itself is not repeatable due to the varying values throughout the image.
If you plan on using the image as a background for the entire website, then you can simply size down the images in Photoshop before you use them. I think it’s better to provide the largest resolution in the package so that they can be sized down to whatever size you find necessary. You can’t size things up 🙂

I downloaded these images earlier this evening and after I installed one, it has now overwritten my home page button and is taking my readers to some Cialis link. Is it possible that your images have been hacked and have code written into them? If you need to see what I am taling about, you can go to my site. I have deleted the image but it is still there and if you click the home button you will get the cialis link